Transcript
Speaker: This is an interesting podcast. My mom was listening to diary of a CEO or something like that. You ever heard of that? No, who was the CEO? She was listening to Steven Bartlett. Anyways, the guy, I guess he interviews lots of different people, but someone was talking about starting businesses in, you know, under AI, you know, new stuff. And he was talking about the.
Speaker: Basically, summing it up, it's like, you know, you do have to come up with a personal brand to some extent. And the world of long form content is here, you know, with Trump on Joe Rogan and, and all that kind of stuff. People want to see free ball long content. That's how, that's how you buy trust with your customers. hey Okay. Speaking of free ball long form content. Here we go.
Speaker: Welcome back. Welcome back. Joey, glad to have you back on the show. How are you feeling after a, uh, how are you feeling overall percentage wise? I'm feeling 70 % right now for those people not aware. I missed the last podcast. I was battling the flu or COVID or something like that. It felt a lot like when I had COVID, I didn't get myself tested, but, um, yeah, kind of like long, long flu like symptoms.
Speaker: Tis the season. I feel like everyone I know, including my parents all got COVID right now, except for me. So I'm like dodging a bullet, working from home. Might go get a COVID shot. I don't know if it's, that's going to be effective at this point. Yeah, not sure, but I mean, I'm glad it happened now. I feel like I've got enough time to recover before our upcoming trip to Japan. So I just, you know, traveling sick is not fun.
Speaker: Totally. Well, glad to have you back. We are going to do a free ball, dear diary kind of series episode today. A lot's been happening in the world. We're going to take this conversation however you want and not really worry about the listener learning too much about Akiya stuff. But I think inevitably we're going to talk about Japanese real estate and how current world events are affecting us, right? We always do.
Speaker: All right. So very first topic. Trump is now our president of the United States. Maybe not your president, but my president of the United States. How do you, how do you feel about that? And how does the Accumart website traffic feel about that, Joey?
Speaker: Yeah, it's interesting. This has been something we've talked about recently. Someone from the Nikkei Shambun, so large, maybe like the Wall Street Journal of Japan kind of newspaper, reached out to us to ask specifically about that. Have we seen any upticks in traffic due to Trump getting elected president? Are Americans trying to leave the country? and you know move ah abroad and at first I was kind of skeptical someone else in the space you know maybe a few months ago that's starting someone we know is trying to create a bunch of like video content about how to buy and renovate homes in Japan
Speaker: And they told me that they were aiming to have this video content release the day of the American election. And I thought, no, there's no way people are going to be, you know, to the election's not going to have any impact on, you know, people wanting to purchase property in Japan. But after the Nikkei Shimbun article, I've been paying a little bit more, or sorry, they we theyt they didn't get an article, but an interview.
Speaker: for the Nikkei Shimbun interview. I have been watching our analytics a little bit closer, and yeah, there was a spike around the election, but a very big spike we've seen in traffic, signups, et cetera, around the inauguration. It's crazy. It's like a hundred plus percent traffic. It's like are we were it's and it's is's incredible how much more traffic we're getting now, but it's also ah weirdly coming from a lot of different places in the world.
Speaker: you know we As we look at our active users, we had, for the first time in a long time, ah would the US was overthrown by ah Italian users looking at AccuMart. I found that really interesting.
Speaker: Yeah, sometimes I don't know if you see it given the time zone you're in Taki, but when I wake up in the morning, Japan is usually the top traffic country at the moment. And then that shifts to the United States, you know, quickly in the morning at some point, I'm not sure exactly when, but yeah, it does it does jump around, but you're right about Italy and EU in particular, we don't see a lot of traffic from the EU.
Speaker: The cool thing about Aki and Martin and something we haven't really dove into is we have a lot of cool data. And I think there's a lot of analytics that someday we can pull this apart a little bit. But you know we we have, looking at our analytics site right now, we have like a hundred users online at this minute, which is like pretty insane, Joey. Congrats.
Speaker: congrats yeah i do think we have interesting data actually just this morning for whatever reason and i decided to look up the zillow blog see like what is zillow talking about are they excuse me are they talking about their data in any way i kind of wanted to see what type of data research they are doing and see if we can get any inspiration from it because Now, especially with the more like geospatial stuff that I've been doing for listeners and users of the website out there, we're coming out with a bunch more map based features like the ability to, you know, like a short term rental map. Where can you do short term rentals? What laws are in place there? Quite complicated, but other things such as landslide hazards, which zones are zoned agricultural, very hard to buy property and agricultural zones. but You know, given that I've been spending so much time on geospatial stuff, I feel like there's a lot of interesting analysis that we can start doing. I'm excited. I'm excited. Data nerds here. But yeah, thank you guys for, for checking out AcuMart. It has been growing quite a bit and you know, we have a couple of super fans here, so appreciate your guys' support. Keep the feedback coming. We have been getting emails every day by smart, you know, getting good feedback and bad feedback, but just send it through and we do appreciate hearing it.
Speaker: Send it through, even bug fixes, you know, I'll reply to every single person that hits us up with, uh, with, with bugs that they noticed. So do appreciate that as well. All right, let's go back to Trump here a little bit. So our site traffic has nearly doubled since inauguration, which has been interesting. Um, actually thinking back to, we've done a lot of consoles, actually get some more on console stuff later, but I've had at least three one -on -one consoles of people being like, I want to leave the country because of Trump. Do I know we've been splitting up consoles a little bit more often. Have you had any, I have had.
Speaker: Yeah, maybe three sounds about right. I wouldn't say it's overwhelming, but maybe, and and and you know, rarely I, so I bring up the topic of politics when we're on these consults. So it would be on the client for them to bring it up. But yeah, three sounds right. I had one dude who just like very, very explicitly was like, Hey, I'm prepping in case Trump gets elected. And I was like, whoa, that's very straightforward.
Speaker: But it's, you know, if for anyone that's in that camp, Japan is, I think a really good option affordability wise, safety wise, you know, it's, it's overall, we've talked about a little bit. I think Japan has its deep set of problems that I don't know how it's going to turn around, but for at least the short to midterm, you know, if you really can't stand being in the U S and make America a great country again, it's a good option to consider Japan.
Speaker: Yeah. I mean, you, you are going to replace one country's problems with another country's problems. You know, Japan's not perfect. I live in Canada right now. Canada's not perfect either. Every country has its problems. So it's not, there's no, you know, the grass is grass is greener kind syndrome is at play here, I believe.
Speaker: But do you think these people like, you know, obviously you need some sort of visa immigration status to just up and move to Japan. Are these people in on your consults? Are they thinking that far ahead? Hmm. I'd say probably no. And anyone listening to this, he's like, how do I get a visa? Take a listen to our.
Speaker: podcast episode with Nick at Japan remotely. He talks a little bit about visa strategies, how to get there, but no, most people are kind of just thinking like, how do I buy a house? And they're kind of similar to us, just like. They want to start building a backup option if something goes wrong here, which is I think quite fair, but short answer. No, people aren't thinking far ahead. If you are considering though, just know Japan's visa system, you are allowed to buy property without a visa, but to be here on a tourist visa, it's typically you can be here for three months at a time, twice a year. Am I saying that right? Three months at a time, twice a year. Yes. Yeah. It gets complicated without jumping into that more. I do recommend.
Speaker: Uh, talking with Nick or listen to our podcasts with Nick, but yeah, very, very high level. You can do 90 days in Japan twice as a tourist. And again, that's a privilege, not a right. You can be refused in the order for any reason. Yep. All right. Let's talk a little bit about tariffs. I know you're in Canada. I know we've had this discussion as we make our business. Joey's based in Canada and based in California. Trump has put tariffs on, has that gone into place or when does that go into place? The 25 % tariffs on Canada, Mexico, and I don't know what happened in Colombia just like yesterday.
Speaker: Yeah, right now the Canada, Mexico stuff, I think he delayed it till February 1st, but even then it, it's coming up. It's like next week. I mean, it was supposed to be day one of the presidency. So who knows, you know, there is a lot of bluster that comes from Trump and maybe he forgets things and moves on to whatever is exciting for him at that moment. So unsure, but tentatively February 1st.
Speaker: Question, is this going to affect Japan? To my understanding, psychologically, the country of Japan is going to be, or like every country is going to be like, hey, is Trump going to put a tariff on us now? It's like a back of the head worry, right? But I don't think there's anything immediate.
Speaker: Nothing immediate that I've heard of. I do think that you brought up Columbia, which is, you know, but you know, in the news right now, that just kind of happened. I do think Trump sees tariff says his like, you know, he's got a hammer and everything looks like a nail. So I do believe that if Japan were to do something that Trump doesn't like, I believe he'll pull out that hammer.
Speaker: Damn, that that's all right. Interesting, interesting tactics. Yeah. He like, what was the thing with Columbia? Like he sent a whole bunch of people, the US was deporting over back to Columbia and they sent the plane back or something. And he threatened tariffs with that.
Speaker: What happened? Yeah, a little bit more nuanced. Columbia and these other South American, Central American countries, they're already except, you know even during the Biden administration, deportations were happening, but they're happening on civilian aircraft. And just reading the news, it appears that the like the head of the country's military needs to explicitly agree for another country's military planes to land in the country. And because Trump was deporting his migrants using military planes,
Speaker: the head of these governments needed to explicitly agree for those planes to land and Colombia's president said no. Oh boy. Oh boy. Yeah. so They are accepting deportations. It was just this one instance where they happened to say no. a Interesting. I think like it's, it's, it's interesting how the globe and the world is ah maybe I think are looking at this and seeing like what's going to happen with us. I think Japan's quite safe though. Cause we're, we're pretty strong partners and Masayoshi -san just put a hundred billion into the Stargate. Is that what it called? Stargate plan?
Speaker: Stargate sounds right. yeah I haven't read too much into the the AI stuff. I mean, here's the thing with Japan though, Canada and US s are very strong trading partners as well. So things can flip on the, you know, on a dime here. I do think that the biggest issue with Trump tariffs is going to be domestic. You know, tariffs disproportionately affect American consumers more than they affect the country that he's aiming them at. So if Trump starts firing off tariffs,
Speaker: all over to all these different countries, it's going to affect Americans more than it's going to affect those individual countries' consumers. So what's going to happen to America's economy if you know a bunch of these tariffs come into play, very high tariffs come into play? And if American consumer trends change as a result of those tariffs, how's that going to affect what we're seeing with foreigners buying property in Japan? I heard something, and I don't know if this is Correct, but I heard that he was trying to replace federal income tax with the revenue generated from tariffs. I don't know how this works, but Masters of Economics, Joseph Stockman, what do you think about that idea?
Speaker: I heard that too. I don't know too much about it. What I just see, again, ah I feel like my knowledge on that particular subject is limited to comments I read online, so I wouldn't say my sources are the greatest. But it sounds like someone tried to do that, a president in the past, like right before the Great Depression, and then the Great Depression happened. So a lot of people point to that specific example of that exact policy going wrong.
Speaker: I mean, anything involving Trump and taxes, I think he's going to disproportionately again, favor the the wealthy class over, uh, middle America and, uh, the business owners were for business owners. Now, Joey, we get to reap some of maybe hopefully the benefits here. Unfortunately, not the wealthy class quite yet though.
Speaker: Oops.
Speaker: Can you hear what you do? What are you Google in there? I hear you Google in something. Sorry. i'm I'm good. I was Googling like who the last president was who tried to put that those plans in. I was interested to see, but kind of find it anyways. I actually, while Googling, I did see that Japan is increasing its rate, interest rates, I think. Right. Have you heard about that? I did hear about that a little bit. Yeah. I don't think too much.
Speaker: We should definitely have a meal on this podcast soon to talk about loans in Japan. I think the loan, the loan game we're, we're getting into a little bit where, you know, for anyone listening, we are working with them piloting maybe a loan product with someone in California to try to get a loan in Japan. It's proving to be a little complicated, but you know, he's, he's thrown out 2%, 3 % interest rates, which is ah absurd in California and the U S yeah.
Speaker: I did read somewhere that again, I don't know of how I could be wrong with all these numbers, but something like 80 % of residential mortgages are floating rate mortgages in Japan. So yeah the bank of Japan is constrained from changing rates because the, you know, everybody has these floating rate mortgages. I don't know how true the 80 % number is. And I don't know how true the bank of Japan is, is considering that when they decide on rate changes.
Speaker: Yeah, I actually looked at it up and I think the common arm structure or adjustable rate mortgage in Japan is the rates get reviewed every six months. So like with every tick of the interest rate, like it screws over the entire, like everyone with a loan in Japan eats it, which that's brutal.
Speaker: But for us over here in the States where we're dealing with the seven, 8 % interest rates, I'm happy to hear if we can somehow get two to 3 % loan, especially on a samurai compound, which has been socialized with us. Joey, how do you feel about this Ishikawa off market deal that is a hot off the press for us?
Speaker: I think it's very exciting. You know, I kind of, I kind of want it. So for people not aware, I don't think we've talked about this before. this our first First debut. Yeah. Yeah. A friend of ours who is involved with the committee or ah for some sort of government committee.
Speaker: involving maybe these cultural properties in Ishikawa prefecture. Again, I'm not exactly sure what this person's connection is, but let's just assume he's connected. He approached us with, this is a ah former, I believe, samurai's residence, like, you know, actual samurai from back in the day, way up in the Noto Peninsula. The the actual structure and property was used as an art museum, I believe, for past little while.
Speaker: And very cool building it that you know looks like what a samurai residence would look like. Got it's you know the samurai crest there and everything. And the prefecture is going to demolish bulldoze this house. And I think this friend of ours who's part of that committee stepped in and said, let's try to find a buyer first. you know Let's spend six months trying to find a buyer. If not, we'll demolish a building.
Speaker: But he approached us and saying, this is going up in a private auction. Are we interested? You need to submit like a realistic bid to be part of the the auction process. But that, you know, this, I think the starting bid was like $40 ,000 US. So which sounds like nothing for like a, and this is like a registered cultural heritage property in Japan. So $40 ,000 for like a registered cultural heritage property that You know, that is exciting. That's, that's very cool. This, this off market deal. It's like a true a vision, like a true samurai compound. It's got like the guard walls where I feel like there's little slits for like air, like bow and arrow people, you know, stuff like that. Like what? last so different This place is like a five hour drive from Tokyo and it's like really far out there. So me and Joey have been like, what?
Speaker: What the hell do we do with this place, even though it's awesome? It's like so far away. And I guess we're we might be going in for a bit of like, what, 40k or something, which is low, but it's also like, are we ever going to spend time here, Joey? What's what's the monetization model? We don't know. A lot of questions.
Speaker: Yeah. A lot of questions. Asian model is, is kind of the biggest blocker, I would say for me right now. It's, it's, excuse me. It's far from Tokyo. It's not that far from our Myoko property. So, you know, I do see like a chain trip like that, but again, I don't know how we would like this museum closed because they weren't seeing any traffic come through. Do we really think that we could take this property and turn it into something profitable? It's a good question.
Speaker: I think, yeah, I don't know. Maybe opening, like if anybody is interested out there in a samurai property, former residents, samurai residents, let's say bidding starts at around $40 ,000. Just send us an email. I don't know if you can get in, you know, no promises. I don't know. Maybe we'll get more information. Our guy's going actually on the ground. he's He's going, I think next week to check it out. And again, we're. seeing like maybe we might be able to finance this. It seems very murky, but it's interesting. We are getting approached left and right with some more off market deals. If you are in Japan, we're also actually, we launched a new product, Akiyomart Native Listings, where we are now doing more, we're trying to help people sell their Akiyas directly a little bit more so than them listing on Japanese sites. As we mentioned before, we've seen a huge
Speaker: huge uptick in site traffic. So it's it's cool to see that we are able to get eyeballs onto these people's Akiyas. So Akiyomart native listings, plug. If you know anyone that wants to advertise, let us know. But overall, I think the theme of this year, Joey, is we're working a little bit more with local governments or we're trying to. We're actually connected with someone in Nagano now, someone in Ishikawa trying to figure out like, how do we help leverage Akiyomart to Show more of these Acia bank info or off market deals to folks. Exciting times. Kind of like, I don't know, feels like Lord of the Rings. We could be the the one ring to rule them all. You know, there's a bunch of smaller Acia banks out there that, you know, poor UI, ah no one's really discovering them. um Could be something that we could.
Speaker: I don't know if muscle our way in is the right word, but like, I do think we can provide value to all these prefectures that are trying to find buyers for these abandoned homes. Yeah, absolutely. It's it's it's crazy to see how fragmented the tech is in Japan specifically. And like everyone, we're working with a couple of larger Japanese corporates at this point. And it's just like.
Speaker: Joey and I have really taken for granted our tech grinding corporate experience the past 10 years. I feel like really going on zoom meetings, sharing stuff, using like general like, profit like automation tools or, you know, efficiency tools have been really compounded and built into us at this point. If anyone, e you know, there's so Japan kind of is the land of opportunity. If anybody is, you know, feels like they know their way around modern,
Speaker: internet tools, I believe there's opportunity in Japan. It it really is eye -opening working with some of these Japanese companies and seeing, and and you know, even just taking a look at Japanese internet. I do think there's a lot of opportunities in Japan. Now that being said, very hard to break into the the market there.
Speaker: Very hard. But it's like once you've broken in, I do feel like we all of a sudden feel like there's a huge opportunity for us. like There's so much stuff to disrupt if we just apply what we have in Western tech over to Japan, even if it's like based like stuff we did we you know we were working with two years ago.
Speaker: likeke but ah try Try to do anything in Japan you know coming coming from America and you will see opportunity you'll see what you'll but you'll feel friction. 100 % guaranteed, you'll feel friction and you'll see opportunity. I specifically remember, so Joe and I, we went to this larger corporate you know office and it it was such a it was a good experience. It was really eye -opening.
Speaker: We'd driven in from Tama Bay's campus and and parked, and then we went to this like really ritzy hotel. like That hotel's awesome, Joey. The Okura, it's where the American people have Trump. It's where the American presidents stay. They have their own building. American presidents have their own building that I believe, looking at the Wikipedia, is exclusively reserved for the American president.
Speaker: Whoa, okay. It is like dripping style, mid -century modern, like so cool. we We definitely should go back. But we went in, so a company we were trying to partner with or still partnering with works in that office. We went in for like a, you know, like a business meeting. Both Joe and I had done a lot of corporate tech meetings. I used to work at Google and like host a lot of people. So everything's usually like set up in the room. You have the monitor, you have the speaker, the HDMI cable to plug in. We went into this meeting room and it was just like,
Speaker: mayhem, absolute craziness. Like the web. funny day like that I mean, the room wasn't set up to use a webcam. So they had this like little third party portable one and they're trying to like you get it at the right angle so that the whole room is in view and like there is nowhere to put it. It wouldn't balance on the TV properly because the T the top of the TV was slow. That was like a 45 minute ordeal trying to get the the web. And I think we we scrapped it in the end.
Speaker: Yeah. And it it was cool though. At the same time, there's still a lot of like traditional aspects where like they were picking up the phone and being like, can we get this waitress over here? And the waitress was taking our order for coffee and stuff. And it was like you know very formal. like it was It was interesting. I'm glad we got to see a little bit of like but i ah traditional business in Japan and with the merging of of modern tech.
Speaker: So I've actually, I mean, this stuck with me. I have no idea. And maybe this was specific to the individual. So maybe there's nothing to read here, but we all ordered coffee. I got ice coffee. Can't remember if you got anything talking, maybe you just had water, but the two Japanese businessmen we were meeting with, they both ordered ice coffee as well. They didn't touch it the whole, like they didn't even open the thing or take the straw out or stick it in. they They didn't touch it at all. I was the only one that drank that.
Speaker: drank the iced coffee. I think that maybe they drank the water from the water bottles. I can't remember, but I don't know. That stuck with me for some reason. Maybe they were nervous. I don't know. First first business meeting with us. ah I'm not sure, but I thought it was weird. They didn't touch the coffee at all. They didn't touch they didn't even take the top off to like put the straw. Wow. Maybe they did that just to like blend in with you. like oh joey Joey's jerry's getting iced coffee. I'm going to get the same thing. Yeah, it could be. i'm Maybe I'm thinking about it too much, but I i remember that.
Speaker: All right. Let's, let's transition a little bit. I think, yeah, we've realized a lot that our tech backgrounds and our corporate background, just like answering email and stuff has, has trained us in ah in a weird way. So looking back, quite thankful, but moving forward, it seems like something that's really enabled us, Joey, I think is AI, right? And like almost every aspect of what we've been building has been so much easier.
Speaker: We're like, we really started this business with AI, right? Same time as like when Chachapies. So tell me about the coding side. what What have you been, how much has it helped your helped you? Tell us about the CTO British boss. You know, sometimes I feel like a 10x, 20x engineer as a result of AI. I do use it limit, like I do. So peers that I hear talk about use it a little bit more embedded than I do.
Speaker: for anyone else listening out there that knows what I'm talking about. I just ask targeted questions of chatgbt here and there. I don't use cursor or any of the new tools that IDEs that have AI built in and understands your code base a lot more. I am a little bit concerned that maybe I'll eventually fall behind if I don't start using those tools. So maybe I should give it another go. Just for now, I write my own code and then just ask targeted questions of chatgbt now and then. But even that.
Speaker: you know, 20X productive, I would say, in the early days of building our website. I had like a I think they call it like a system prompt or like a prompt you put at the very start of every conversation with chat gpt and I just asked it to talk like one of the characters from top boy I was listening to a lot of British hip -hop at that time and uh just kind of like enjoy you know i I think in my head I was just you know sitting in a coffee shop all day listening to British hip -hop and then when I was
Speaker: talking to chatgbt i wanted it to be one of these artists that i was listening to or something like that so i had these system prompts where i told it to if anyone's listened watch the show top boy kind of like the wire but based in london i wanted it to like sound like one of those characters and it was pretty funny at the start i've since abandoned that but top boy hack my My friend Chris in the Santa Fe, who is a, I know him from grad school, but very smart guy in the machine learning and AI space himself. And he, he scared me. He was like, you know, those who no one knows.
Speaker: how the prompts affect the answers. And he's like, you know, adding that type of stuff could make it give you sub quality answers or, you know, no, no one really knows how the AI is doing it. So he was, he was being cautious. So since I've been considering that, because, you know, there have been a lot of times where AI has kind of boxed itself into a corner and it's like not, you know, for example, Stripe API, it took me at first, you know, kind of classic, didn't want to read the documentation for to get set up with Stripe API and just ask chat GPT to write it for me.
Speaker: And stuff wasn't working. It wasn't working seemed real, you know, obviously seemed confusing because I wasn't putting in the time to actually understand what's going on. But, you know, sometimes it gets so fixated on certain things and it can't like zoom out to understand holistically what you're trying to solve here for your business. So was certain, you know, and I do feel like that took me, you know, I wasted a week on a solution that chat TBT was pushing me towards. So I kind of got out of that. You're calling him top boy and and you make getting to know. The best part of it was I asked him in my system prompt to get end every message to me with some sort of motivational things. So like I used to say, you know, like you got this big mountain or like something like that after every message to me. So that that that was nice, but yeah, I don't do that anymore.
Speaker: I specifically remember a visit in you in Cambridge when you had your, you had dreads, you had a Cambridge boxing club, kind of like Jack red jacket on, and we went to this Chinese place near your house. Like every day, there was a vivid memory that sticks with me. It wasn't dreads. It was cornrows, but cornrows, sorry, corn, cornrows. Yeah. Cornrows. I think you had a temporary Mike Tyson tattoo on your face too. Those were, those are the days, Jerry.
Speaker: That was, I miss the the Chinese food in Cambridge really good. Yeah. So, I mean, interesting that like we really, we we saw an article and you'd send stuff like the new thing right now is like two person startups that leverage AI to to grow really fast. And I think we are maybe one of those, right? We have become one.
Speaker: Definitely. We don't use too much AI in the product itself. We use a little bit like we translate a lot of Japanese text. Sometimes it gets it right. Sometimes it gets it wrong. And I think we're spending a little bit too much money and I need to, you know, retweet some parameters there. I just haven't had time to get to that. So from the product, we're not leveraging AI as much. I think there's more we could do at the moment. We're not doing too much, but from a development perspective. Yeah. I don't think there's any engineers out there really now that aren't using AI.
Speaker: Yeah, we're using it in like every asset of our our business too. When we do consults, we have note takers, which has been huge. You know, we've talked to so many people and haven't, we haven't taken a single typed note, I feel like in our conversations for the past year, which is breath of fresh air as a yeah current recruiter. Uh, such a, such a good tool. And it summarizes like who we chatted with. If we can send it to agents, could not have been here without AI. Thank God.
Speaker: could not have done it. In all honesty, though, like I do enjoy writing code. Sometimes I'll turn it off for certain problems that I know I'm going to enjoy writing the code for. I will turn turn it off and then just you know write it myself. and i I don't know. I like to think that that keeps my keeps me sharp. I have no idea if it does or not. But for certain problems, I will turn it off. I still enjoy writing code.
Speaker: Well, AI is about to boom. So going back to Donald Trump, I i heard the U S has that project Stargate and Masayoshi from soft bank put in a hundred billion. I say, I think the U S is putting for another, like so total 500 billion to try to make us the AI capital of the world, which I think it's doing a pretty good job of Japan's got, what's that one company, Sakana AI. I don't really know what their thing is, know that what what they do, but they researched. Have you heard of them? Yeah. research a Okay. They're kind of more like a research R and D.
Speaker: business, I mean, maybe someday they'll come out with like a product, like kind of like open AI. I feel like they're like open AI minus the chat GPT product. Okay. I've been hearing a lot of buzz on deep seek China's AI. What do you, have you heard about anything? Like, do you think that's viable for us to use from a cost perspective? I mean, I always made the joke a lot, you know, first when we started using open AI, so we use, ah sorry, no, we actually use Gemini in our product. Now I have the code half written to switch over to open AI.
Speaker: API, but it's kind of expensive. I will say for what we're doing, I'm sure there's some inefficiencies in what we're doing. And I do need to take another look at it, but I would say kind of expensive, especially for a hobby project. So I always made the joke that, Oh, I can't wait for the Chinese and Russian language, large models to come out. Just, you know, I'm just thinking about cost here, but yeah, deep seek is, is, you know, that model I took a look at its API costs about a week or two weeks ago.
Speaker: And it's less than half of what Gemini Google's LLM is charging us. So pretty, you know, I haven't played around with it, but we're not doing anything too crazy. You know, we're we're translating translating things. So I do think it would very likely be adequate and might be worth us switching over to deep seek.
Speaker: That being said, there's a lot of skepticism in the space too. So deep seek they're claiming they, you know, whatever they built their model, trained it or what, you know, $6 million dollars or something, $6 million dollars versus, you know, and what opening I asked for 7 trillion or something to build AGI. So some people don't believe that they did that. They believe they're actually sitting on a lot of Nvidia chips in secret, again, something with trade embargoes and.
Speaker: Sanctions that that they're not supposed to have those chips, but some people believe they actually whatever through black market or or something Do you have access to those chips and they're just not talking about it? This is the teemu in AI. I hate Teemu. My mom buys so much teemu shit i don't know if's this team I haven't played around with it in all honesty, but everyone is talking about how good it is. So I kind of think it's a real rival. I don't, obviously it's gonna, you know, probably have some level of censorship, but I don't believe that the American ones are without censorship either. So true.
Speaker: All right, Jerry, if we're redoing our descriptions, if we're, yeah, let's say we go down this road, we do decide let's use deep seek. My request on the descriptions on the, each listing is have bullet points. Oh yeah. so i mean That's been top of mind for it. It was going to be my Christmas project, but then my Christmas project kind of turned into a meme pack. But yeah, I agree. Five bullet points max. Yeah, I agree. That's, that's, that's the real brain rot way of doing this.
Speaker: Can we also have it try to pull leasehold and non -leasehold in just like description format? what We have it. how im I've actually been pulling that information all along. Sorry to everybody out there who's been using our product and want to know if the property is leasehold and freehold. I have that information in our database for every single listing.
Speaker: yeah the the biggest issue so we're we're actually scraping a lot more data than we're presenting the biggest issue is that it's free form data so it's not like I'm pulling in the data in the sense like free hold yes or no it's you know I wish it was that like a Boolean value it's called and software engineering or or mathematics, a Boolean value, a a true or false yes or no. No, it's free form text. So someone sometimes people write a paragraph when really all I want to know is, is this lease hold yes or no? But sometimes they'll put a paragraph in there and you know I can't mechanically, through code, determine whether that's free hold yes or no. So I've just been sitting on that data. The best way would be to pass it to DeepSeek or OpenAI, some sort of AI.
Speaker: and ask the AI to translate that into a yes or no. Absolutely. And we know we've, we, a lot of people have reached out, us ourselves have been disappointed at times where we like find a dope property. Then we all of a sudden find out it's leasehold. So top of mind. Thank you, Joey. That's actually why first it's for savvy users that know our website. If you look at, there is a filter called has free parking on our website. And I, there's like a little, you know, in parentheses, it says beta.
Speaker: That's because I made an attempt. So that's again, that's free form text. It's not like, does this property have free parking? Yes or no. It's does this property have free have parking and then the ability for Japanese real estate agents to like, you know, write a paragraph if they want to. So there's, you know, infinite different ways that Japanese real estate agents are answering this question. And I tried my best to come up with like a mechanical way of turning that into a Boolean yes or no with limited success. And that's why it says beta because it's wrong some of the time.
Speaker: And I think AI will get it right, you know, much closer to 99 .99 % of the time. Yep. Let's do it. i'm i'm I'm pumped. I think, yeah, we' we've gotten so much feedback from folks and and Joey hats off to you one man one man team building this website. So let's see what AI can do here. But Lee sold is coming soon. Bullet point is coming soon. If you have any strong feelings on what should be in the description, we do acknowledge that chat GBT has a lot of fluff and some of these descriptions like I've personally
Speaker: never read one description on our site from start to end. I agree. No, especially the area descriptions. Yeah, I don't so i i know. i've I fully accept it, guys. Sorry. The the the descriptions are very little, literally helpful. whatever Whatever I'm trying to say. Not very helpful. The tiniest bit.
Speaker: I had a friend actually reach out and he's like, I love your guy's area description. I'm like, what really? He's like, yeah, it helps, helps me get a better understanding. And actually, no, we could definitely, we should let's, let's talk about this more. live like Like sometimes I think it does pull in interesting information. Like it'll talk about,
Speaker: you know randomly I'm on some listing in Hokkaido and it's like oh hey this arts and crafts museum is three blocks away kind of thing like sometimes it does pull in something interesting but it's surrounded by this layer of AI fluff that like where my eyes just glaze over nestled in a picturesque district of blah blah blah with vibrant you know like you know like yeah I do think the um bullet points is the way to go Yeah, I wonder, let let's play around with the prompting. It'd be interesting to be like, hey, tell us, ah could it link us like a ah great restaurant within 10 mile, you know, 10 minute walk or something like that. Closest ramen shop, hyper liquid kind of thing. ah Probably too much, but.
Speaker: Yeah, maybe I'll build this like a quick tool. So a lot of the the prompt engineering is a little bit scary to change. So maybe I'll build this a tool. So here's how it works for everybody out there kind of thing. So we scrape listings, you know, we're scraping.
Speaker: a lot of listings every day, but in terms of new listings, let's say 2 ,000 to 5 ,000 new listings every day. And of those listings, there's a single prompt I have that takes in all the information about the listing, I tell it what to do, and then it spits out these descriptions of the property and descriptions of the area.
Speaker: If I change that prompt, you know I can play around with it on my computer and I can see how it works for like this property or you know this single property, you know one -off test. But as soon as I make that change and I unleash it onto the world, it's going to start doing that for every single property coming through.
Speaker: and it's hard to know Is it going to make mistakes? Is it going to talk about Hiroshima? like For example, one of the early problems I ran into was I asked it to make an area description you know as we were just talking about. But for properties in Hiroshima, I kept talking about World War II, which is not something I wanted to talk about in descriptions for these properties. So small changes can sometimes have unintended consequences. Sometimes it stops translating and it'll I don't know if anybody else has ever seen this. Very rarely it'll leave Japanese characters as is in the resulting property translation. so yeah you know Sometimes small changes have unintended consequences for ah we're for what we're trying to do here for the for the resulting description and area description. It is a little bit scary changing the prompt and I don't have a good way of like, you know I can test it for one or two or three properties but
Speaker: you know When we apply it to yeah every property in our dataset, it's hard to know what it's going to do. It's funny. I remember on the chant translations, there's like that one town called like cannabis town or something like that. Like Jerry, is this, is this right, man? I sent you one the other day, big money station. Um, that's the, that's a good one. Actually that's a different problem. So again, people familiar, you might see things like the town. So the addresses that we have on Aki and Mart and then the nearest train station.
Speaker: that we have, those are actually translated not with AI, but with Google Translate API. So it sometimes will translate things literally. So there is a town I think in Tokushima, Taima, Taimashi, or Taimamachi, or something like that, which, you know, the literal translation, Japan used to be a large hemp producer back before the Americans imposed cannabis restrictions following World War II. Japan used to produce a lot of hemp.
Speaker: and this town is called Taima Town or, you know, Cannabis Town, Hemp Town, somewhere in Tokushima. But Google Translate API translated that literally. And now the town, if you look at the address for properties there on Akiyamart, it's going to say Cannabis Town. Or I found one the other day that I sent to you talk, a big money town, big money station. So those are actually translated with Google Translate API, which is a, it's not AI, it's a mechanical translation that you know this is pre AI days that Google came out with this so there's issues there you know as well clearly with the the mechanical translation there's issues with AI translation there's no silver bullet but AI is the closest to the silver bullet that we have right now.
Speaker: What other things would you like to see in the description? Do you think prefecture is, is good to have? Like, do we have a per prefecture, we have a non -AI or like we have some, Hey, Okoyama is famous for XYZ kind of thing. Or do you think that's just like too much? I thought about something. It's going to be so repetitive. You know, every, every listing is going to have that same information on it. Like maybe we have like a page, like find more about Okoyama.
Speaker: properties and has like, maybe it goes to our our landing page on specific, like Okeama stuff where we can link to stuff. We can maybe take advertiser stuff there. Okay. Opening up a whole new box. Great job on SEO, by the way. I feel like we've been doing quite well since the changes as you put in.
Speaker: All thanks to can't remember who we talked to you. We talked to Brian, Randy, Brian, Randy, ta shout out. He's a homie over at Coinbase Airbnb. Did a lot of their SEO strategy. Hit him up for consulting. If you, you guys are interested.
Speaker: Yeah, I think he does consulting, right? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. All right, Joseph, that was a lot of deer diary series, long form. Again, we didn't talk too much about Akia, but a plug for our samurai. What are we calling? Not so samurai house compound samurai compound. We'll come up with that. I don't know if we can offer it to anybody else guys. I might've jumped the gun there, but you know maybe something to consider for the future. It does seem like this individual has more cultural heritage properties that are going to be up for sale soon.
Speaker: Yeah. So, all right, man, we are going to Japan quite soon. We're going for a whirlwind trip mid February to early March. We know there's a lot of people, but we're going to be moving fast. One of our main goals is to buy this house in Nagasaki. Again, we're setting up the rails to hopefully sell this via crypto.
Speaker: A lot of question marks for us there. I hope might be the first Bitcoin sales property, I hope. But if you are interested in a pretty nice, well -maintained property in Nagasaki near the ocean for a quite affordable cheap with everything included. So we're going to put a car, we're going to do a home inspection. We will have some local on the ground people that speak English to help project manage. Give us a holler.
Speaker: Let us know, anything else um especially if you want to buy it in Bitcoin. Yeah. Only accepting Bitcoin or Ethereum. Or are we accepting stablecoins? Maybe. Also, yeah. Maybe. Let's see. I'm bullish on crypto. Also another Trump topic. You know, I think a lot has been happening. So I think we need to make a Acuamart Bitcoin strategic reserve, Jerry. That's my final thought.
Speaker: by Buying at the all -time high, always a great strategy. just Just dollar cost average. I think we got to start dollar costing averaging a little bit. I do believe in dollar cost averaging. Yeah, less dollar cost average. I'm more bullish on Ethereum, but I know we have a lot of crypto crypto listeners here, so tell us tell us what we should do. But other than that, Joey, I hope you feel and get back to 100 % and I will see you in Japan soon. See you soon.
